Meet Dr. Arie W. Kruglanski

Arie W. Kruglanski is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He directs a lab that studies human motivation as it affects thinking, feeling, and behavior. His lab methods include experiments, neuroscience work, computer modeling, surveys and content analysis. The lab has collaborative relations with universities around the globe including Italy, the Netherlands, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Poland, and Denmark.

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Kruglanski’s work has been cited more than 50,000 times. It has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Conversation, and the World Government Summit, among other publications. His theoretical work has been published in Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, American Psychologist, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He has written five books: The Three Pillars of Radicalization: Needs, Narratives and Networks (co-authored with Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna); The Radical’s Journey: How German Neo Nazis Voyaged to the Edge and Back (co-authored with David Webber and Daniel Koehler); The Motivated Mind; The Psychology of Closed Mindedness; and Lay Epistemics and Human Knowledge. He has also contributed to edited volumes— including Psychology of Extremism, Psychology of Terrorism, the Handbook of Basic Principles in Social Psychology, and the Social Psychology of Knowledge— published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, Guilford, Plenum, and Taylor & Francis, among other publishers.

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Kruglanski was a founding co-director and co-principal investigator (PI) of START (the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism), at the University of Maryland, as well as a PI on a five-year Minerva grant to study radicalization and deradicalization in the Middle East and in South East Asia. He is now a PI on a Minerva grant for the study of refugees in the Middle East and Europe.

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Kruglanski’s research interests include human judgment and decision-making, the motivation–cognition interface, group and intergroup processes, and the psychology of human goals. His work has been published in more than 400 articles, chapters, and books and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Deutsche Forschungs Gemeineschaft, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Naval Research, and the Ford Foundation. He recently served on the National Academy of Science's panels on counterterrorism and educational paradigms in homeland security. He is also the outgoing president of the Society for the Study of Motivation.

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Kruglanski is a recipient of numerous scientific awards, including the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, the Senior Humboldt Award, the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the University of Maryland Regents Award for Scholarship and Creativity, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He held the Regesz Chair at the University of Amsterdam and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is currently a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He is a former editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and a former associate editor of the American Psychologist.